‘you will find me if you want me in the garden
unless it’s pouring down with rain’
– Blixa Bargeld

Garden

It has rained overnight – not a lot,
but enough to touch below the surface layer,
tempt or taunt or soothe the subsoil. A deeper
quenching than any the gardener
has been able to give us. His giving voice
is a ploy as we are prepped to his end,
an end in which only some of us will see
our way through to seed, the gestural
hibernation, the activism of prayer-time.
Ask yourself what you are doing
to the collective body and soul
as well as each angle of sustenance,
each propagation towards an organic
cosmology, that before and during
the first instant, it was all root, rhizome, tendril.

Gardener

What leaves the bounds of protection –
the fence against foragers and diggers –
is to be celebrated, and I wish it well
where it doesn’t choke out others.
This puts me in a position of responsibility
and sunders your agency, which is either
hypocrisy or paradox of physiology.

Garden

I fool you – I only want growth
to maximal effect, and growth isn’t
necessarily what you desire, what
you have in mind. I throw up so many
deceptions which ethics says you can’t
be thought of as such – I taunt you
with plants you can’t possibly
let run their course. Dilemma?

And that rain shower, what are
its implications beyond a day or two?
Many, I tell you. Different birds
have arrived and certain insects
have switched into next stages,
different predations and ingestions.
But it’s also the optimism of rise,
of stretch, of loving the sun
you have so come to fear
when it works on a different
timescale from your despoliations.
You have refocussed it, but I – we –
search it out through the lens
of cloud tracking its halo,
find heat in gravity
nurturing. We’re not
giving up the code yet,
no matter how much the esurient
‘knowledge seekers’ try to unravel
us, reduce us to nuts and bolts.
At least you admit none of them
by choice. At least. We share
that resistance,
but what do we apportion in austerity?

Gardener

I have a report of potatoes
reaching up from their hollows,
waiting to be covered layer by layer,
but not here, not yet. Too dry.
This little rain won’t reach
them in their heart of hearts.
Not yet. But as you say, optimism!